Laura Hankin: On a Bad Review Leading to Romance

Laura Hankin is the author of Happy & You Know It, A Special Place for Women, and The Daydreams. Her musical comedy has been featured in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she is developing projects for film and TV. She lives in Washington DC, where she once fell off a treadmill twice in one day. Follow her on Instagram.

Laura Hankin

Photo © Katie Tamaro Photography, 2022

In this interview, Laura discusses the real-life experience that helped inspire her new romance novel, One-Star Romance, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Laura Hankin
Literary agent: Stefanie Lieberman, Janklow & Nesbit
Book title: One-Star Romance
Publisher: Berkley
Release date: June 18, 2024
Genre/category: Romance/Women’s Fiction
Previous titles: The Daydreams, A Special Place for Women, Happy & You Know It
Elevator pitch: A struggling writer must walk down the aisle at her best friend’s wedding with a man who gave her book one star on Goodreads. Though this maid of honor and best man would rather never see each other again, they’re forced back together over the course of a decade every time their best friends celebrate a new life milestone.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I … had to walk down the aisle at a friend’s wedding with a man who’d given my book one-star on Goodreads. We did not go on to fall in love, but it gave me a great inciting incident for a novel!

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

All in all, a little over two years! It took me a couple months to figure out how the main hook (maid of honor, best man, one-star review) could be an entire book. Was it all just going to be set in and around this wedding? How would the characters grow enough to fall in love with each other? Once I realized that it actually took place over the course of a decade, as they went from their mid-20s to mid-30s, then things really opened up, and I wrote the first draft in about eight or nine months.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I wouldn’t say it was a total surprise, but I’ve been so delighted to experience how welcoming and passionate the romance community can be. I’ve been wanting to write a romantic comedy for a while now, and had been sneaking romcom subplots into my other books, but this is my first time working in the genre, and the other authors and readers I’ve interacted with have just been the best.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

A part of the novel that readers have consistently mentioned as being among the most moving (it happens toward the end, so I will not spoil it!) didn’t actually come to me until either the second or third draft. It’s always so funny and miraculous how something that seems woven into the DNA of your book can be a late addition like that.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope it makes readers laugh, cry, swoon, and want to call their best friend. And I also hope that it can be a warm hug to anyone who feels like they’re running behind everyone else in life, or are not yet the person that they want to be—the best things take time!

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

You have to do a lot of bad writing to do good writing! You’re going to throw out ideas, pages, and hours of work, and you’ve got to find a way to make peace with that or else you’ll be so paralyzed by trying make something perfect that you won’t make anything at all.

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